Somnium (1634)
Its full name is Somnium: Seu Opus Posthumum De Astronomia Lunari, or The Dream, or a Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy. It was written by famed German scholar/astronomer/philosopher Johannes Kepler in 1608, but as its title suggests, it wasn’t published until after the author’s death. It’s a very odd story about Kepler falling asleep and dreaming about an Icelandic teen who gets sold to Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. After learning astronomy, he returns to his mother to discover she’s been talking to demons, who are willing to fly them to the kingdom of Levania—aka the moon. Sounds more fantasy than sci-fi at first, but Kepler knew that both heat and oxygen would be in short supply on the trip, they’d have to slow down upon approach unless they wanted to crash-land, how the moon would look from the Earth, and more. Of course, the moon is home to a wide variety of flora and fauna on both of its sides, but the science in this fictional book is irrefutable.
